Why is the Irish correspondence of the London papers so
often a tissue of fables? We have ourselves been recently led into three somewhat serious errors by the minuteness of these fabulous inventions. First, there was the man (Mr. O'Connor, of King's County) whose nose was cut off by four ruffians ; the outrage created the greatest sensation in England, till a few days later it appeared that Mr. O'Connor had been afterwards seen in Dublin with a nose certainly not scarred or sewn on, though he might perhaps have received a blow on it in the encounter. Then the murder of Mr. Walsh was reported in the Times as a murder committed from trade jealousy, because he had greatly raised prices in the egg market by buying up the eggs on, all sides. Now it appears that no such motive at all can have had anything to do with the matter. Mr. Walsh himself in his dying moments entirely acquitted the persons suspected, and asserted that he believed himself to have been murdered by mistake for some one else, as he had no personal quarrel with any one. It was, no doubt, an ordinary murder, the only peculiarity of the case being that the intended victim was not the actual victim. Murders in England are reported every day without the invention of motives which turn them into serious symptoms of a disturbed society. So little trace is there of agrarian combinations in the neighbourhood in which Mr. Walsh was murdered, that when the Marquis of Sligo evicted exten- sively in order to prevent tenant-right claims, some little time ago, not a single agrarian outrage occurred. Lastly, the reso- lution of the Mallow Tenant Farmers' Club, which was said last week to have been passed, was in fact, we are assured, rejected. The Limerick, Tipperary, and Clare Tenant Farmers' Club has just been speaking with confidence and respect of Mr. Gladstone's Government. Nothing can be more mischievous just now than the dissemination in England of falsehoods adapted to blacken the Irish character.
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